Unexpected things that could bring down your website

[Asia_Expat]

I've had a couple of bizarre near misses with my main website. I keep a backup (weekly) on my notebook and until recently, that was the only backup I kept. I create a zip ball of the whole server, including all email folders. Even though it was zipped up, my notebook virus scanner picked up on the attatchments in the 'Spam' folder and erased the backups... I failed to notice this was happening for quite some time. I was losing my backups and if the server had gone down, there would have been no way for me to restore!

Another thing I almost got caught out by...
My forum used to have a backup administator account that I never used. The email address associated with that admin account was set to '[e-mail]' but I had long since allowed that domain to drop as I no longer wanted it. All a competitor would have to do was pick up that dropped domain, set up the same email addres, hit the password recovery function and voila... instant access to the admin core of the forum... astonishing!

Do you have any similar stories and caveats to share?

[edited by: Asia_Expat at 6:10 am (utc) on Jan. 21, 2009]

[kaled]

I can't comment on near misses, but I would never allow anti-virus software to auto-delete anything. Also, there is little point scanning within archives if real-time protection is also used. Switching off archive scanning can speed up background scans considerably.

Kaled.